Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wednesday June 21, 2006 @12:01PM
from the buying-friends dept.

NoGuffCheck writes "CRN is reporting that Darl McBride is looking to get Unix developers back onboard with cash incentives for completing training in SCO's new mobile application kit; EdgeBuilder. It doesn't stop there; there's a 12-cylinder BMW or $100,000 dollars for the development of the best wireless application."

All developers are required to pay their $699 SCO licensing fees at the door.

It isn't a licensing fee. It's the price of paying the SCO lottery! For the low low price of $699, you have a chance at one of several fabulous prizes including $100k, a luxury car, and a night of terror on Darl's private yacht complete with built-in dungeon! Fun for the whole family!

Hahaha, this is the truth right here. Who else read this title and thought (In the words of the great Borat) "F*#k To You". Alienate the whole *nix community, and then try to bribe them back. That'll ensure you get the 'right' people on your team.

"Aw, baby... look, you know I didn't mean to hurt you. It's just... sometimes I get so angry. You make me really angry sometimes. But I love you - I love you. I won't hurt you again, I PROMISE. I'm going to get help.

"Yeah, I know it's happened before, but it won't happen again - I swear! Come back home baby."

two re-hired SCO developers telnet to the SCO server after a night in the basement.

arroot: so...SCOdev: what?arroot: how 'bout scheduling a grep job to see if there is any SCO IP in Linux?SCOdev: are you crazy? what if the server is logging and the resource throttle triggers an alarm to the CEO?arroot: but I love you so much.SCOdev: it's too risky.arroot: pleeeeease?

*login*

IBMdev: SEC said it's "ok" to give the AIX repository a grep job, or SEC will come down to perform a grep job, or I can do it. But for Gates' sakes don't use/bin/wall to echo your chat to all the terminals.

"Aw, baby... look, you know I didn't mean to hurt you. It's just... sometimes I get so angry. You make me really angry sometimes. But I love you - I love you. I won't hurt you again, I PROMISE. I'm going to get help."Yeah, I know it's happened before, but it won't happen again - I swear! Come back home baby."

In order to get that car you need to sign a contract with SCO. Any code you develop belongs to SCO because any code that runs on unix is a derivative work. Oh and Contracts are what you use againist your friends.

Yes SCO is claiming such things in both the court of public opinion and sometimes in the court as well.

Any laid off developer would be better off collecting unemployment and staying out of SCO's lawyers reach.

Exactly. Furthermore, if you read the fine print on the other side of the second appendix to the last page of the contract, it says that SCO, in addition to owning you, will also own your wife, children, dog, truck and home, because they are all your derivatives. Although the wife has a legal option to divorce and seek custody of the children, the SCO also realises that this may be bound by any prenuptual agreements, and they reserve the right to challenge any such 'weak' and 'inconvincing' prenuptual agreement in various courts.

I expect that they'll probably find people to come work for them. Not because of any automobile inspired conversion on the road to Damascus, but just because some people will be desperate enough to work for someone they hate. But they'd have to be desperate. And if they're wise they'll get they're money up front, because SCO probably won't have anything to pay them with by the time development finishes.

Only of course they can't can they? Because it's a "prize", and you don't award prizes until the end. So I guess they'd have to be gullible as well as desperate.

I'm sure there's enough computer programmers out there that don't know about the whole SCO fiasco that they would gladly go and work for them. Probably not any programmers with real Unix/Linux experience, but there are a lot of developers out there who don't know about this stuff. Not everybody reads slashdot.

True right until they Google SCO.How many developers will go to work for a company without typing their name into Google.How many people with ANY experience with Unix don't know about SCO.Finally there is a major danger having SCO in our work history. Even if they loose this law suite which I bet they will someone will buy the SCO IP. Would you risk hiring a developer that worked for a company that filed such outlandish IP based law suites? Not everyone has the deep pockets of IBM.I think that working for SCO might just be too dangerous for just about anyone to risk.

This is such a waste of their time. Do they really think anyone is going to take them seriously? Sure, a few misguided folks might, but, as far as I know, SCO's reputation is now squat in the tech industry. Besides, the incentives SCO offers probably won't be enough to pay off the lawsuits that SCO will file against you before you've finished your app.

Perhaps they should create a contest for "most creative way to destroy SCO" or something like that instead. It'd be much more fun. (Although seeing who actually enters this contest might be interesting.)

Dude, most people will do anything for a buck. It's why we have shitty products on the shelves, crap service at every turn, etc, etc. I'm certain SCO could score an entire division of developers within weeks if they simply offer cash money.

Also... I hope the people who do take part realize that by doing so, SCO could claim ownership of every piece of code they ever have written, or ever will write. Give them $100,000 with one hand, sue them for $1.5Mil with the other if anything they ever do makes a profit. That appears to me to be SCO's current MO, and I can't see why they'd change it for this one little competition.

SCO should make a reality show. A reality show about a company going to the ruin. Then we could get people to call in (1-900 number of course) to decide who they are going to sue next. I'm sure it'll be a hit. In fact, I'm of to the patent office right now. That's about the only way I see them making any money.

Hmmm... on a completely cough random topic, I think I might switch from MySQL to Postgres.

HP, I could care less about (their computers are cheap, and their calculators are nothing like they used to be), but I thought that MySQL had a decent set of morals. The fact that they could maintain enterprise support while still offering an open-source version is an indication of that. (Although I believe some of the MySQL products are available only to enterprise customers, which is evil.)

HP, I could care less about (their computers are cheap, and their calculators are nothing like they used to be), but I thought that MySQL had a decent set of morals. The fact that they could maintain enterprise support while still offering an open-source version is an indication of that.

I'm confused by this post. I just have to ask you to clarify...

Are you saying that MySQL is immoral/evil because they *gasp* charge for some things they invest time and money to develop, or is my sarcasm meter broken?

No, I think he means mysql is evil because they are sponsoring SCO's disgusting attempt to buy their way out of the history books and back into mainstream corporate and technology circles. I happen to agree...MySQL is more evil than companies like HP et.al. for the very reason he cited: they are in the free software community, they know the issues, and they certainly cannot be ignorant of how Darl McBride and SCO tried to steal GNU/Linux from its creators (yes, steal, because if McBride et.al. had succeeded in their fraud, the creators of the Linux kernel, and perhaps the wider GNU community, would have been denied the right to legally use their own creations), and they've chosen to sponsor this despite that knowledge. At least a big company like HP may not have followed this (all the SCO bruhaha could be beneath their radar).

I agree that sponsoring an evil knowing its full implications is an act of greater maliciousness than sponsoring an evil in ignorance of its full implications, and MySQL certainly appears to fall in the former category.

It's a pity...I actually like their product. Time to give postgres a gander I suppose.

One could also say that MySQL is supporting their customers who may not have a choice of platform. If I understand correctly, MySQL was supported on SCO and than it wasn't for a time and now it is. I doubt all administrators of SCO systems drink the Kool-Aid SCO offers and would love to switch platforms but cannot due to money, personel, or software that would need to be ported. Sometimes transitions start in phases and running MySQL on SCO might be the start (or an intermediate step) of proving that the existing system can be moved to another platform. I applaud MySQL AB for sticking by customers who are in a less than appealing situation. Someday those administrators or DBAs may find themselves in different jobs and they will probably be more likely to choose MySQL AB products if those products aren't already in place. Additionally if these people choose MySQL sometime back, having the support from MySQL must have been a relief for a number of reasons.

I don't believe users should have to suffer for someone elses mistakes but the big point here, to me, is that MySQL AB is supporting its users and isn't that what we want from any company or source of our choice of tools?

iirc, it was SCO who paid mysql money for them to support SCO users, not the other way around.

Right. I went back and read TFA, and Mysql is NOT sponsoring this. Neither is HP. They are offering Mysql and HP "training," and smearing those company's names in the eyes of those who don't read carefully enough (the poster I replied to, and myself to name two).

I stand corrected: Again, MYSQL and HP are NOT Sponsors of SCO's laughable ploy, and probably have nothing whatsoever (or as little as possible) to do with SCO.

I stand corrected: Again, MYSQL and HP are NOT Sponsors of SCO's laughable ploy, and probably have nothing whatsoever (or as little as possible) to do with SCO.

Bullshit. Google for SCO Forum 2006 [caldera.com]. Click the "sponsors" link. Read that HP is a Platinum Sponsor and MySQL AB is a Gold Sponsor. Now, that may mean $10 and $5 respectively, but you can bet your butt they're letting SCO use their names in the advertising.

Your idea of "as little as possible" covers a whole lot more than mine.

Quote from TFA:> To draw Unix developers back into its embrace, SCO is offering cash incentives for> developers to attend its upcoming user group conference in Las Vegas in August.

Quote from promotional materials for the above user group conference:> SCO and MySQL AB have teamed to create the ideal applications platform SMB and> replicated/branch enterprise computing environments. With SCO and MySQL, you gain the> competitive advantages offered by both open standards and open source.

MySQL AB is listed as a 'Gold' sponsor and the preceding is the copy for that placement.

It's Shrewsbury [boston.com], actually. Although I doubt there's anyone there anymore to get offended. I don't know what's in Digital's old building, but they're long gone from that area, as are most of the old Boston-based minicomputer companies. (Data General, Prime...so many others.)

I've called for support on their printers...and they ended up on my "do not buy" list.Yes, it was an end-user printer. So? I rate a company based first on my experiences with it, then on reports from other people. That inevitably means that if their consumer products are shoddy, I will consider the company a manufacturer of shoddy goods. And HP isn't quite there...the printer is cheap, but not shoddy. Their technical support, however, is shoddy.

What I would like to know is why is HP & MySQL helping to finance this?!? What a way to get company blacklisted - especially a GPL project.

I looked at TFA, the SCO contest site, the SCO site, and NONE of it said MySQL or HP was sponsoring this contest. It did say there would be MySQL and HP training at the SCO forum, but that doesn't mean that the training is provided by or sponsored by those companies.

SCO is trying to promote its alternative to LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) with SCAMP (SCO, Apache, etc.). But because it can easily acquire and redistribute all of these components under the GPL and even offer its own support and training for them, it can make things look official when they're really not.

I'd need some more evidence than an unsupported post on/. that MySQL is giving any aid or comfort to the enemy before I started modifying my opinion of the company or their software.

"SCO has gone through some rocky times. It's been a real roller coast ride the last few years," McBride said. But SCO is now focused on making mobile business transactions easier to implement. Ring tones for cell phones has become a $1 billion market, McBride noted.

So they go from something meaningful to Ring Tones? That's one crazy roller coaster.

Not surprising at all... SCO is now like VRML, a technology that was always looking for a purpose, rather than technology trying to solve a purpose. It almost reminds you of this company in the year 2k in SF, Istorage I want to say? The original business model was to provide 25MB of FREE storage space that you could access anytime! BY 2002, they had become a design studio or something.

Companies have to keep rolling, so the executives can keep the money and options going.

I think that if they want to be known as something other than the one who sued prominent Linux users they should DROP THEIR CLAIMS AGAINST LINUX! If you want to be known as something other than the company that sued prominent users of Linux, it might be helpful to not sue them. That way they can be known as something other than the company that sued prominent users of Linux.

They can't drop their claims against Linux now. It's gone too far. To drop the claim would be to say they sued everyone for no cause and wasted the court's time (the courts would not look kindly upon that). It would be handing the various companies a guaranteed win on all the counter suits, which aren't likely to go away just because SCO says, "Oops, our mistake. We did not mean to inconvenience you. Please pretend this never happened." They're in for the long haul, and are undoubtedly going to be trounced, torn apart and their management held legally responsible for making fraudulent claims.

It is inevitable that there will be a shareholder lawsuit as SCO makes its final circles around the drain before bankruptcy or liquidation. Darth Darl needs to make it look like he made his best effort at keeping the company afloat to have a chance of keeping all of his money.

I don't think they will be able to find enough developers that will trust them. They're already trying to steal the work of countless others, the sentiment goes, why would we try to do business with them again?

This is why their former customers are not going to be future customers, unless they're badly locked in on some 3rd party software. And non-customers will never become customers. Who wants to do business with somebody who'll sue you for moving to a competitor's product? It's like getting divorced from a gold-digger.

I'm sure there are plenty of less-than-ethical developers who wouldn't scoff at the potential of a BMW (note the article says 10-cyclinder whereas the summary says 12-cylinder) or the $100,000. Developers don't own their work, so the question of stealing work becomes irrelevant. The relevant question is whether an SCO manager will just give the cash prize to his nephew.

To reiterate: developers aren't clients so the trust question doesn't arise, or at least takes a different form.

Except in theis case it's developers avoiding working for SCO. But the less who do, the better the chances for someone else to get the prize. So there's an incentive to break ranks. Maybe be the one and only developer.

Think of it as a lottery with your integrity against winning a fast car.

taking a grand from SCO doesn't have to cost you your integrity. there's no commit to do any development is there? just go through the training. sleep through it even! or is there some fine print that i missed?

taking a grand from SCO doesn't have to cost you your integrity. there's no commit to do any development is there? just go through the training. sleep through it even! or is there some fine print that i missed?

You have a contractual relationship with a company that is on record for stating that contracts are to be used as weapons against their customers/partners/employees.

Sign a contract with a venemously litigious company like SCO and unless you have a lot of capital to spend on lawyers (one hell of a lot more than the $1000 they're offering), SCO owns your ass (and any code you write might well be considered "tainted").

Sure sure, use their products to build your applications, and then they will give you your new shiny BMW and 100,000 bucks. And then they'll sue you for all your money and the BMW. This is just a trick, they want customers with money, so they can sue them. How do they actually get customers with money? Give them the money!

I think they need a reality check: perpetual motion is not possible in this universe.

Maybe this is just money laundering, they give you the money, write it off as expense. Then pay their lawyers by letting them to sue the people with the money and the BMWs.They must be avoiding taxes with this somehow!

Those darn CRN folks, always leaving parts of the quotes out. Here's a reprint, I put Darl's original comments missing from the report in '[]'.

"During the last 25 years, SCO has been committed to [destroying the reputability of] the Unix platform and continues to reaffirm its commitment [to make fools of ourselves while the rest of the world actually accomplishes something useful]," Darl McBride, SCO president, said in a teleconference Tuesday morning.

I applaud him for finally admitting what his company has been doing. Of course, he can shove his BMWs up his/dev/null.

It's not 1994 anymore. Nobody uses UnixWare or OpenServer. Those that do, probably want out as fast as possible. Your products are obsolete: Your hardware support sucks. Standards implementation sucks. Didn't you just get USB support in UnixWare a couple of years ago? Nobody is even worrying about whether or not their software will compile on your operating systems these days. You've alienated the entire Unix market systematically.

You're DEAD. Get over it. File chapter 11 and liquidate those assets already.

You are mostly correct. Chapter 7 bankruptcy is generally a controlled liquidation of the entire company (Ch. 7 also applies to certain personal bankruptcy cases). Chapter 11 is the "reorganization" chapter, where in theory, firms divest themselves of underperforming businesses, restructure their debt and return lean and mean. However, there are Chapter 11 cases where all of the assets of the business are sold in bulk, which looks a lot like a liquidation.Of course, this theory doesn't really reflect much o

You are absolutely right. I worked on SCO systems as a contractor for TACO BELL for a few years programming and maintaining their back of house software used on PC's in the store. They had an effort to create a windows based in-store system, but that has been abandoned. Now, they are porting their back of house applications to SUSE Linux with a view to getting off of SCO systems as soon as they can. The same is true, I believe for their fellow Yum brands company, Pizza Hut.

This latest move by SCO is desperation -- trying to find some new market in which to stay alive while their bread and butter UnixWare and OpenServer business withers and dies. SCO is going down.

Can somebody who has actually used either UnixWare or OpenServer say if they have any redeeming qualities at all? From what I've read, they are actually the least capable of the modern unixes or unix-clones, even on x86(except perhaps for minix - which was just a teaching project anyway). Is there any reason why anybody would choose UnixWare or OpenServer for a new deployment?

It sounds like they think they have is a niffty middle-ware stack for cellphones and they want to use that as a hook for selling their Unix stuff. But if their middle-ware stack is so niffty that it would attract developers, why not port it to other systems to widen the audience and build a new business on that? That was the strategy taken by 'old SCO' aka Tarantella before they unloaded unix on Caldera.

OpenServer (at least v5.0.5 which I have) is weird. It's better documented than Linux is and can ever hope to be - the docs are more consistent, more accurate, more complete, and better written. It's also incredibly stable in most ways - but with a few REALLY annoying quirks. As it's also stable in the same way a fossil is (What, buy and upgrade? Get bent), that's frustrating. It also has some incredibly annoying limitations, a set of developer tools so bad they boggle the mind (and the alternatives aren't great either - haven't got Skunkware's gcc WORKING yet), and some basic services we're used to just being there... well... aren't. Oh, and printing on SCO is one of the worst messes I've ever had the misfortune to work with - it makes Linux printing look like heaven, and it's pretty awful too. If you now feel the need to scour your eyes with steel wool, you're not alone.

I maintain an OpenServer box for work only because of a legacy app that requires it. Well, strictly, the app requires Microsoft Xenix to run - it's from 1983 (!!) - but SCO OpenServer's XENIX kernel personality does the trick with a few quirks. OpenServer at least supports PCI, >16MB RAM, and >512MB disks, unlike XENIX. (OpenServer 5.0.5 actually supports up to 2TB disks/arrays, >137GB ATA disks, etc. Not bad for an OS from 1995). If it weren't for that need - which Linux can't satisfy even with the defunct ibcs project - I'd be rid of OpenServer in an instant. Linux 2.6 isn't as stable as I'd like, but that's worth it... and there's always Solaris as an alternative.

I can't imagine anybody buying OpenServer now. Its only purpose is legacy support. Unixware doesn't even have that. Before Sun released Solaris for free, they had a tiny sliver of hope from people who need more stability than Linux provides... but with a free Solaris, they're just doomed. RHEL and so on help a fair bit with regards to stability in Linux too - something which also doesn't help SCO in the slightest.

Even if their technology wasn't obsolete crap, who on earth would buy from a company that sues its own customers? Oh, wait, I use Microsoft software at work and I'm well aware of its involvement in the BSA & BSAA so that's no argument at all... but the obsolete crap point holds.

and they can't wait for their apps to make the move to Linux. One customer - and this is an end user - is talking openly about the "end of SCO". Another moved to an application running on an IBM i5 (the modern version of the AS400). If there is any cost involved to an upgrade or a fix, SCO customers often just move on to another platform. There is now an entire mini-industry involved in converting data on SCO servers to some other server.

Besides, even the latest versions of SCO/unix seriously suck. We swapped out a tape drive in one and it took days to get it running and required lots of phone time. Until I started on this project I had forgotten how difficult Linux was in 1993; that's where SCO is now.

Now that the stock price is in free fall, He needs to have something to show that he and his cronies were not out to use SCO stock "Boiler Room" style (http://imdb.com/title/tt0181984/) when the stockholders sue. This way, he'll be able to say: "We tried to make a go at it and nobody wanted to develop for our platform...".

It what way do you mean "free fall" when speaking of SCO's stock price?

SCO's stock is currently at $4.30, which is about where it has been since the the climax that occurred in 2004. Today's stock price is almost smack dab in the middle between the 52 week high and the 52 week low and today's trading volume so far has been 250 shares. Current price is the same as it was when it opened today. I would call this the doldrums rather than a "free fall". Large amounts of SCO's stock is held by a very few number of people and few outsiders want to buy any, which means that the stock trading volume is generally very low and the price is steady. I wonder if there is anything, short of losing two appeals after losing to IBM, that will significantly impact SCO's stock price.

SCO criticism is mostly all valid, but this is just wrong. SCOX has been holding steady at ~4.20 for months and months - it's all insiders peddling tiny volume. It was in freefall, oh, a couple of years ago, but it's stable now and it ain't going anywhere.http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=SCOX&t=5y&l=off&z= m&q=l&c= [yahoo.com]

We don't like you. You don't play well with the other children on the playground. We think you're mean and we're not going to let you play dodgeball with us at recess.

Besides that, your products are pretty awful. The only redeeming quality of Caldera Linux was that it was based on RedHat. That made it really easy to completely dump your distribution and go to RedHat when you guys got out of the Linux game. Your OpenServer product is the the most god awful piece of crap ever sold. It's so painful to work on that I'd rather just gouge out my eyes with a spoon.

Step 1: drop silly lawsuitsStep 2: apologizeStep 3: Entire executive team and anyone else who supported the lawsuits resign and disgourge yourself from any lawsuit-related profits, such as profits from short-selling.

Do that, and I'll consider helping them out. Until then, they are blackballed.

After everything they've done to shit on open source, they have the balls to announce this? Unbelievable. And if anyone here participates in this then you should never speak about open source again. Nor should you ever bitch about anything MS does, because participating in this would be the biggest sellout of all time.

Hi, its Paul. You don't remember me because you weren't associated with SCO at the time, but I was an SCO developer and beta tester 'back in the day'. I ran a public access SCO UNIX system in Philadelphia. I (helped) run the UNIX SIG on CompuServe and converted a bunch of applications so they ran on SCO platforms. On the commercial side, SCO UNIX ran construction management and engineering procurement software for a $500MM project (it no longer runs on SCO).

Not any more, Darl. That ship has sailed. I'm a 50 year old, bald, bearded engineer and I'm mad as hell at you Darl. I will do anything in my power to make sure you fail. I grep'ed through old source code just to find prior art (and I still have source from 1984).

I'm not alone Darl. We are the decision makers now. Money and cars don't cut it. Your goin' down, Darl, and the harder the better.

I won't post the link, because SCO shouldn't boast "users" because of this, however.....

Some nice items:"You must be a qualified developer with the.Net and Java development platforms, having developed on those platforms. You must be able to demonstrate proficiency with these platform languages and may be asked to submit an example of Java application you or your company has developed."

So, they can say you are not qualified because they have given no criteria about what is or what is not qualified.

You need this much machine:

"a. Memory 768MB, HIGHLY recommend 1GB plusb. Windows XP Pro or Windows 2003 server (Windows XP Home will not work)c. Processor speed - faster the better, at minimum should be Pentium (P4 class) 1.8 - 2.0GHz plus.d. If firewall software is installed, it must be configurable.e. Need to be able to disable anti virus software"

This would require having Windows XP Pro or 2K3 Server, no thanks.

It would cost more than $1000 to get to vegas, stay at a hotel, make sure you have the software & hardware needed.

If he's such a good sales person, where are the sales? If he's "speaks the language of business", then were are the revenues? If he's so good an incentives, where are the developers? Where are the quality people?

The toughest job in tech right now must be a SCO sales person. The swear words they must have learned from cold calling...

Whoever bought the rights from the creditors would then retain the rights. In the current environment where you can patent "flat cylindrical device to affect forward and reverse movement" and sue anyone with a wheel, I don't think the purchaser would release to public domain. Of course, at that point, they obviously couldn't use it to wedge up Linux, so not sure what other use it would have. Probably would have a few lawyers just sit on it, looking for ways to sue others.